Eclipse Community Survey 2011

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the results of its yearly
community survey, which looks at various aspects of development in and around the Eclipse ecosystem. However, it also reflects the changing developer biases around the globe as well.

The first notable change from previous years is the decline of Subversion as a source code management. Although it is still the single most popular version control system, the decline of Subversion has been matched with a significant rise in the use of DVCS such as Git and Hg. Git has almost reached the penetration size of CVS, and is about three times as popular as Hg; with the increase of Eclipse projects moving to Git this is likely to increase in the future.

Whilst Windows remains the most popular developer environment, with Linux a strong second, the use of Mac OS X on the desktop has increased to almost 10%. This may be due to the increase in development for mobile tools; over 60% of the respondents had either developed or planned to develop mobile applications. Android was more popular than iOS, but other mobile environments fared much worse, with Blackberry and Windows receiving around 15% of votes each.

Whilst Eclipse is still predominantly used as an IDE for Java development, over a third of respondents used JavaScript editing or C/C++ editing.

Finally, the growth of StackOverflow for community support is specifically noted in the review, behind only Google searches and direct visits to Eclipse.org. Visits to StackOverflow outnumbered use of the Eclipse forums.